In the last financial year, effort was put into minimising waste and reducing our carbon footprint. This year, this section of the report focuses on our head office in King's Cross, London. However, carbon emissions include both our Manchester office and our newly opened New York Office.

Carbon Footprint

Office-based carbon emissions (including our data centre) fell by 7% or 270tCO2e in the last financial year, despite the fact that we opened a new office in New York. Our London headquarters at King's Place saw both gas and electricity consumption fall, resulting in emissions per member of staff falling by 9% to 2.3tCO2e.

Other improvements included fitting stand-alone air-conditioning units for our archive centre so that the main building chillers do not run out of office hours. The cost of the installation will be recouped in a matter of months through available energy savings.

Waste Footprint

A campaign called Love Your Waste was launched last year across Guardian News & Media, resulting in an increase in recycling rates, including composting, from 66% to 78%. All waste is managed according to current legislation, and, even though we do recycle WEEE (ie computers, mobiles), batteries, toner cartridges and CDs, this data was not available for inclusion in the waste figures.

Beyond improving signage and bins, we wanted to impress on staff that what we throw away has a value beyond its current life.

In order to maintain progress and stop staff slipping back into old behaviours, we now collect data from our cleaning team for each floor so that we can target individual departments.

Resource Footprint

We develop plans based on two key factors – impact as well as visibility. This means that even, though some issues are not significant in terms of reducing our overall footprint, they are perceived to be important to employees and so need to be addressed.

One example was concern among staff over our use of hundreds of thousands of paper cups for water. As a result, these have now been replaced by china mugs. To align this sort of sustainable action with the business, the new mugs where branded with the "3 Little Pigs" as part of our Whole Picture brand campaign. This will save more than £10,000 and 472,000 paper cups a year, equivalent to 1.5% of our overall waste.

We have also improved our photocopier paper by moving to a 100% recycled product. However, paper consumption for our printer paper rose by nearly a third in the last financial year. Further research is required understand why this is happening and identify ways to reduce it.

New York

In 2011 December, a new office was set up in New York for about 45 staff. The refurbishment was carried out by local contractors, and where possible we have mirrored the same working practices as our London office for recycling, lighting and energy usage. The office is in a multi-tenanted building and we share ideas on best practice with the landlords.